NOTHING ON TV (TONIGHT)

Someone named Bond paid 53.9 million dollars
for a painting by a guy who tried to shoot
himself in the heart and missed. Is that
desire or the collapse of desire? The yen

and the dollar are quite an item these days.
They are dancing in the center of the ballroom
and people that are being hired and people that
are being fired are bowing to their partners.

What love lies buried in ratings? What kind
of nursery rhyme is radiation and loneliness?
Is it too late to keep the banks safe from
lust? Are there gunmen in our mother’s milk?

Quit asking questions, you tell yourself,
thinking of the luxuriant tank farms of
Jersey. Face facts. Madonna has more
body hair than you find appealing, and

yet her albums continue to sell. The
Lithuanian off-guard in Oakland goes to
the basket with the fervor of a capitalist
toady. The jumping frogs of the Ivory Coast

have sex in midair. Blue sweat is a blue-
green discoloration sometimes observed in the
sweat of copper workers. Humper’s lump is an
affliction of lumber carriers that results in

the swelling of the lower neck. Disco digit
is a soreness or infection of the middle finger
caused by too much finger snapping while dancing.
Rectalgia is a pain in the ass, and mal de raquette

is pain caused by excessive use of snowshoes.
Irroration is the custom of watering a plant
with the discharge of a sick person to rid
the person (say, your aunt) of the disease

and give it to the plant. Strabotomy is the
surgical removal of a squint. Xysters are
bone scrapers and zomotherapy is treatment using
raw meat or the juices of same. Zipper trauma

is the term used by the Journal of the American
Medical Association to describe injury to the
penis from catching it in a zipper. The British
Medical Journal, on the other hand, prefers zip

injury. Guitar nipple refers to the irritation
of the breast that can occur from the pressure
of the guitar against the body. Gomphiasis
is a looseness of the teeth and graphospasm is

writer’s cramp. Floccillation is the habit of
picking at one’s sheets and blankets, as on a
deathbed, while carphology is a picking at one’s
bedclothes. If you have a circumorbital

hematoma you have a black eye, and if you show
signs of mithridatism, you are immune to a poison,
by virtue of receiving over a protracted period
small doses of that poison, as with television.